The Rainbows and the Secrets by Christine Cox (best ereader for academics .TXT) 📕

if they’ve banished us? And we certainly don’t need Rainbows. We don’t need any of them! We’ll have our own monkey tribe.
We'll call ourselves: "The Proper Secrets."
The Proper Secrets had to find food. They had to go into the jungle they had been keeping away from. They avoided the Secrets' side, because Secrets, being good at hiding, were good at finding each other too, and would have noticed them straight away. So, although Shadow was reluctant to eat mangoes, when darkness fell, they set off to the Rainbows' side. It was a long walk down to where the jungle began, and there were no trees to swing through, which would have been much quicker. The monkeys hated being out in the dark, and it was very dark, because there was no moon. They kept tumbling down the steep bits and bruising themselves, and they were cold.
When they reached the jungle they crept quietly in, as Secrets are so good at doing. But even Secrets find it hard to be totally quiet in the dark, because they can't see everything they are treading on or touching. The three of them climbed quickly up the first mango trees they came to. They didn't dare to shake them, or drop the mangoes to the ground. They picked the fruit soundlessly, till each had as many as he could hold in one arm, then slipped quietly down the trees.
But then things went wrong. Thrasher, landing on the ground, snapped a twig under his foot. Shadow thrust his bared teeth into Thrasher's face, and in the darkness accidentally banged his forehead against the other monkey's. They were both too Secret to cry out in pain or shout. Thrasher made no noise in his anger. Instead he silently sank his teeth into Shadow's cheek. A scuffle followed, more twigs cracked underfoot.
The Rainbows, sleeping in their dens, heard nothing of this. But now there were Secrets in this part of the jungle too, who had made dens and were sleeping there. Some of them had woken at the crack of the first twig. At the sound of more cracking they crept out of their dens. Shadow and Thrasher became angrier and the fight became more violent. It disturbed a parrot; the parrot shrieked; more parrots joined in. Within seconds, wide-awake Secrets and sleepier Rainbows came scurrying through the jungle, screeching and snarling at the intruders, pelting them with sticks and lumps of earth.
The three "Proper Secrets" scattered and hid; but they had to keep moving their hiding places as the other monkeys found them out. They were chased to the edge of the jungle, and then back where they had come from, up the hill towards their cave near the cliff top. The two younger monkeys were much quicker than Shadow and left him behind. Half-way up the hill he could run and scramble no further. He sank down, exhausted, behind a small rock, the only cover he could find. He peered anxiously round it, pricking up his ears, to look and listen for his pursuers. Luckily for him, they seemed to have given up.
Slowly Shadow sat up his haunches and picked up the booty of mangoes, which he still had with him. He trudged wearily up the rest of the hill, as day began to break.
In the cave he found Thrasher and One-eye gobbling fruit. "Stop it you idiots!" he growled. "We must save some!"
But Thrasher looked at him rudely and carried on gobbling. Even One-eye finished his mango and spat out the stone before doing as he was told. Shadow was too exhausted to do anything about it. He lay down on the rocky, uncomfortable floor of the cave and went to sleep. One-eye licked his paws and settled down to sleep too, beside what was left of the small pile of mangoes they had managed to bring with them out of the jungle.
One-eye and Shadow woke at noon the following day. There was no sign of Thrasher, and their little store of fruit had gone. If they were to eat, they would have to go back into the jungle as soon as darkness fell.
Shadow and One-eye continued like this for a week or so. They slept, as well as they could (not being used to it) in the day time. At night they made the long walk to the edge of the jungle. If they were lucky, they got away with a mango or two before being chased away and forced to run back up the hill. Now, of course, the Rainbows and Secrets were expecting them, and posted guards in the trees. So they were ready for the two invaders before they even got down the hill. It got harder and harder for the "Proper Secrets" to feed themselves. They were very hungry, and very tired.
One-eye was also very worried. He was afraid it would not be long before the other monkeys grew impatient with having to fend off their night raids and came up to the hill top to hunt them out. But Shadow got angry if One-eye said anything about his worries. In fact, it was getting difficult to say anything to Shadow at all. His temper was very bad: he growled and snarled a lot, and hardly ever spoke.
One-eye was getting desperate, however. "Couldn't we," he said to Shadow one day, "couldn't we go back and say sorry? They might let us have food.."
"Never!" shouted Shadow fiercely. "Never, never, never!" he snarled. "Don't ever mention going back again. Cowards talk like that. Traitors talk like that. You are a Proper Secret. We Proper Secrets have our own tribe. We don't need those other fools."
One-eye didn't like to point out that there wasn't exactly a Proper Secret "tribe": only himself and Shadow. But he wished he could be part of the old Secret tribe again, and have plenty to eat, and feel safe.
The night came when they got no fruit at all, and had to go back empty-handed. By the following evening, neither of them had eaten for at least thirty-six hours. Hungry as they were, they decided not to set off for the jungle at sunset, as they usually did. Instead they waited till the early hours of the morning. They hoped that the guards might have gone off duty by then, and that the monkeys might be sleeping more soundly.
They set off in the cold night air. In human time, it was about 3 a.m. Shadow was very weak. Several times he fell over. Once he tumbled down a steep slope and couldn't get his breath for several minutes. One-eye wanted to go on alone, but the older monkey refused to give up. He got to his feet and struggled on.
But when they were still a few hundred metres away from the jungle, passing through the hippos' grazing ground, Shadow had to lie down, and this time he couldn't get up again. He lay on his back breathing heavily, his eyes rolling.
"Shadow! Shadow!" cried One-eye, panicking. Shadow didn't seem to hear him.
One-eye had to find food for his leader, and find it fast. There was no time to go into the jungle. He must find food now, or Shadow would die, and he, One-eye, would be all alone in the world.
He looked around him in the darkness, and saw hippos eating grass. Could Shadow eat grass? One-eye couldn't imagine it: the thought was disgusting. In any case, he wasn't sure Shadow would be able to chew and swallow grass. What he needed was coconut milk, real Secret food, easy to digest. He could pour it into Shadow's mouth.
As he was thinking this, One-eye saw the hippos wander towards the river and wade in. His eye followed them and he caught sight, in the moonlight, of things floating on the water. They were roundish brown things… was he imagining it? …or could they be coconuts?
One-eye ran to the water and begged the nearest hippo to help him reach them. The hippo was full up with grass and wanting a rest. But he reluctantly allowed One-eye to climb on his back, and slowly started to lumber away from the bank.
As he did so, One-eye became aware of another monkey nearby. It was Thrasher. He loomed suddenly out of the darkness, leapt from the bank, and landed (without permission) on the hippo's back beside One-eye.
This annoyed the hippo, who shifted angrily in the water. At the same moment, One-eye spotted a "coconut" floating by and leaned out to catch it. With a great effort he managed to get the object between his hands. He just had time to realise, with a huge flood of disappointment, that it was not a coconut, but a clod of earth. Then the hippo shifted again, and One-eye slid into the deep water, and felt himself sinking down, and down, and down.


18

Monkey drowning?

Ellie persuaded Ian to let her and Jamie have some of the white emulsion he’d bought, and they painted over the old bridge. It took several coats to cover it, and they had to wait for each one to dry in between, so it was the following weekend before they could paint a new bridge.
They tried to make the new one wider and lower, so the monkeys could run over it easily, and with high sides to keep them safe from the water. But it wasn't easy to paint all that in perspective, and make it come out right. When they went back to the Jungle, they found that the new bridge hadn't turned out the way they'd planned it. It sloped in the wrong places and directions, and it had only one side. In spite of this, Rainbows and Secrets, were swarming across it and back again in both directions, just for the fun of trying it out.
Then a new problem came up, which they had not thought of before. It started to rain. The rain began with a few large heavy drops out of a dark sky. Within a couple of minutes, it built up to a torrent. For the monkeys, this added to the fun at first. They found themselves sloshing through puddles that had formed on the surface of the bridge. Not thinking what the puddles might mean, they merrily splashed each other as they ran across.
But suddenly a monkey shouted: "Soft! The bridge is going soft!"
"It's melting!" yelled another, "the bridge is melting!" The rain was dissolving the bridge. All the monkeys on the bridge rushed off it in a panic. They were just in time. Seconds after the last monkey reached the bank, holes appeared all over the surface of the bridge, and grew rapidly bigger and bigger. There was nothing that anyone could do but watch in dismay as the rain washed the new bridge away. In fact, it washed so much away that it even uncovered the old bridge, and then washed that away, till there was nothing left of what the children had painted at all. Evidently, things that were painted on the wallpaper appeared in the jungle, but didn't last there.
"Do you think we can help them build a bridge, properly?" Ellie asked Jamie, when both bridges had disappeared, and they were standing with the monkeys in shocked silence.
"We shall have to try," replied Jamie. "We'll have to use wood. It won't last as long, but the stones here are the wrong shapes and sizes, and we've nothing to cut them with."
So they set about organising the monkeys to build a bridge. That wasn't easy either. They had to cut down some of the tallest trees, lay them across the water and bind them together.